International

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Innovations Necessary for the Advent of
Cinema:Optical toys, shadow shows, 'magic lanterns,'
and visual tricks have existed for thousands of years. Many inventors,
scientists, manufacturers and scientists have observed the visual phenomenon that
a series of individual still pictures set into motion created the illusion of
movement - a concept termed persistence of vision. This illusion of
motion was first described by British physician Peter Mark Roget in 1824, and
was a first step in the development of the cinema. A number of technologies, simple optical toys
and mechanical inventions related to motion and vision were developed in the
early to late 19th century that were precursors to the birth of the motion
picture industry:

[A
very early version of a "magic lantern" was invented in the 17th
century by Athanasius Kircher in Rome.
It was a device with a lens that projected images from transparencies onto
a screen, with a simple light source (such as a candle).]

Cameras, projectors and other motion picture
equipment highlighted in the texts are listed here, with the inventor or
engineer and/or promoter associated with the machine given in parentheses.
Click on the images for higher resolution copies.

Muybridge claimed that he first employed
this mechanism, which he called a zoopraxiscope, in the fall of 1879, at Sanford's house. A
subsequent demonstration of the projector at Marey's studio in 1881 was
described in Parisian news- papers. A spectacular demonstration at the Royal
Institution in London
the following spring brought wide- spread notices in the scientific press.

In 1883 he
returned to America and
lectured with his zoopraxiscope in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
Largely at the instigation of the painter, Thomas Eakins, who had conducted
similar photographic experiments, he was invited to continue his work in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania.
Here, he radically improved his technique. He used dry plates, specially
sensitized by the Cramer Dry Plate Company.

Muybridge's work was
specifically created for the purpose of stopping action. It was analytical; he
strove to freeze motion, to hold still for our contemplation the most rapid
muscular movements of man and beast. In doing so he was unwittingly creating
the basis for moving pictures. All that was necessary to recreate the motion he
had analyzed was to put the individual photographs in rapid succession before
the eyes of an audience.

Rough hand-drawn analyses had long been
shown in toys, the phenakistoscope or the zoetrope. Marey had tried
unsuccessfully to make a scientific study of animal locomotion by this means in
1867. Posed photographs had been projected in sequence by Heyl in Philadelphia in 1870. But
Muybridge was the first to show action photographs in one of the primitive
motion-picture machines. To do this, he fastened a number of slides on a large
disk. On the same axis but revolving in the opposite direction was another disk
with slots along its radius. An arc light, a condenser, and a lens threw the
images of the slides onto a screen. The motion recreated this way was of very
brief duration. Each revolution of the wheel duplicated the previous action on
the screen, so that the audience viewed a horse monotonously going through his
paces again and again.

Five years later in 1877 Muybridge
resumed the problem of photographing rapid action. Stanford underwrote the
experiments, and made available not only his stable, but also the services of
one of the engineers of the Central Pacific Railroad, John D. Isaacs. A battery
of cameras was built in a shed beside a racetrack to record consecutive phases
of motion.

Muybridge first used a mechanical device
to trip the shutter-strings were stretched across the track, which the horses
broke during their runs before the cameras. These strings were attached to the
shutters, which closed, by the action of rubber bands. These shutters Were soon
replaced with electrically controlled ones: the circuits were closed by the
string method, or by the steel tires of a sulky running over bare wires lying
on the ground. Muybridge was awarded two patents in 1879 for these
synchronization devices.

The background was covered with rock
salt, which gleamed in the sunlight, to give maximum contrast on the slow wet
plate. The results were "diminutive silhouettes," not brilliant
images but clear enough to furnish evidence for scientific study. A set of
prints was deposited in the Library of Congress in 1878, others were published
in scientific journals.Stanford formally published the experiments in a
handsome quarto The Horse in Motion(1882), with a text by
J.D.B. Stillman, and with many drawings after the Muybridge photographs. As
Muybridge later complained, they were published "without the formality of
his name on the title page."

By 1872
Muybridge was a capable and successful commercial photographer. In that year
Leland Stanford laid a wager with a friend, said to have been $25,000, that a
galloping horse lifted all four feet from the ground at once. He asked
Muybridge to prove this contention photographically. Using wet plates and under
a dazzling California
sun, he succeeded in getting faint, highly underexposed plates, which were
barely sufficient to settle the wager in Stanford's favor.